How to integrate a Twitter Wall / Social Wall into your FrontFace Playlists

Digital Signage is not only about hardware, like screens or player PCs and software, but mostly about content! Presenting the latest news or weather information catches interest and helps to make your digital signage system more vivid!

Another great idea for integrating live content is showing posts and feeds from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. You may either want to show your own tweets and posts or up-to-date information that is related to certain hash tags, topics or social media accounts.

Especially for events or exhibitions, displaying live data from social media channels on your digital signage screens is a great idea that motivates users to contribute and to interact!

Therefore, we are very excited to announce that we now have found a partner who is offering a powerful social media wall solution that can easily be integrated into FrontFace for Public Displays.

Sign up for a free trial account at socialwall.com.au. Next, select the social media channels that you would like to show. You also need to specify the size of the social wall in pixels. If you have a full HD screen that is mounted in landscape format and use the “Full Page” page layout for your FrontFace for Public Displays playlist page, the correct values are 1920 for height and 1080 for width. Another important setting is the number of columns that your wall should have. A value of “3” is a good choice but it depends on your personal preference. In order to make the wall scroll automatically in the FrontFace you should tick the “Yes” option for the “Auto Scroll” setting and make sure that the “Pause Scrolling On Mouse Hover” in not enabled.

Now you can configure each social media channel and enter either accounts from which you would like to pull information or specific keywords/hashtags. There is also a backlist feature that allows you to specify words to filter the content that is shown (e.g. your competitors names or other undesirable things).

Once you saved your settings, you can obtain the URL of the wall from the “General” tab.

In the Display Assistant application of FrontFace for Public Displays, create a new playlist page or use an existing one and add a content element of type “Website”. Finally, you just need to paste in the URL of your social wall and you are ready to go. Run the playlist preview so see how your wall looks like.

By the way: If you statically display the playlist page that shows the social wall, you might want it to update from time to time. For this purpose, you can define a reload interval in the “Website” settings dialog in the Display Assistant that will trigger a refresh after the given period of time.